Daily Advice 12.20.20
Dec. 20th, 2020 07:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
readoldthingsSeneca's conclusion to De Providentia is difficult and quite foreign to the modern reader. I was going to leave it out and go on to something else, but I feel like that would be cheating. We've come this far with Seneca; let's make it to the end.
Speaking on God's behalf, Seneca writes:
Yes, he's saying exactly what he seems to be saying. If it gets too bad, you can always kill yourself. Earlier on, he had praised the courage of Cato, who took his own life rather than fall into the hands of Juilius Caesar.
How do you react to this?
My first instinct was simply to recoil, and shake my head at the horror of an earlier age.
After that I tried to argue with Seneca. Can suicide ever be right? No, I thought-- not if the duty to live is a higher moral duty. If God has given us a life, it's an act of impiety and ingratitude to refuse to see it to the end. It seemed to me that Seneca's earlier advice on bearing suffering was much better than this-- let us rather have the fortitude to bear the life we have been given, than to retreat like a coward into a death chosen rather by ourselves than by the gods.
We have a moral duty to see our lives to the end, and not to run away from suffering. By our suffering we may expiate our sins; we may train ourselves to endure; we may learn compassion for others who suffer; we may even offer our own pain as a sacrifice on others' behalf. By suicide we gain nothing.
I think that that probably is the right response. That said, I want to suggest that it is worth taking a moment-- just a moment-- and entering into Seneca's ideas on their own terms. Part of the point of reading these Old Things is that they are a repository of wisdom that we may need in these times. But the other point is less about the content of the Old Things than about their context. Whether it's Seneca or Aristotle, Louis de Montfort or Eliphas Levi, the authors that I post here all lived in different times, different places, and different cultures from ourselves. The result is that they were able to think thoughts that are unavailable to us on a day to day basis. If there is one thing that we as a culture desperately need, it's the ability to think other thoughts than those to which we have become habituated.
Do we need thoughts of suicide? Maybe not, but the very extremity of those thoughts may be work to jar something loose in our minds and open unexpected doors, when an easier thought could not have done so.
And so I repeat the suggestion: Take a moment and enter into Seneca's way of thinking. The way out lies open, and you can take it at any time. Don't fear what comes so quickly.
Speaking on God's behalf, Seneca writes:
Above all, I have taken pains that nothing should keep you here against your will; the way out lies open. If you do not choose to fight, you may run away. Therefore of all things that I have deemed necessary for you, I have made nothing easier than dying. I have set life on a downward slope: if it is prolonged, only observe and you will see what a short and easy path leads to liberty. I have not imposed upon you at your exit the wearisome delay you had at entrance. Otherwise, if death came to a man as slowly as his birth, Fortune would have kept her great dominion over you. Let every season, every place, teach you how easy it is to renounce Nature and fling her gift back in her face. In the very presence of the altars and the solemn rites of sacrifice, while you pray for life, learn well concerning death. The fatted bodies of bulls fall from a paltry wound, and creatures of mighty strength are felled by one stroke of a man's hand; a tiny blade will sever the sutures of the neck, and when that joint, which binds together head and neck, is cut, the body's mighty mass crumples in a heap. No deep retreat conceals the soul, you need no knife at all to root it out, no deeply driven wound to find the vital parts; death lies near at hand. For these mortal strokes I have set no definite spot; anywhere you wish, the way is open. Even that which we call dying, the moment when the breath forsakes the body, is so brief that its fleetness cannot come within the ken. Whether the throat is strangled by a knot, or water stops the breathing, or the hard ground crushes in the skull of one falling headlong to its surface, or flame inhaled cuts off the course of respiration, be it what it may, the end is swift. Do you not blush for shame? You dread so long what comes so quickly!
Yes, he's saying exactly what he seems to be saying. If it gets too bad, you can always kill yourself. Earlier on, he had praised the courage of Cato, who took his own life rather than fall into the hands of Juilius Caesar.
How do you react to this?
My first instinct was simply to recoil, and shake my head at the horror of an earlier age.
After that I tried to argue with Seneca. Can suicide ever be right? No, I thought-- not if the duty to live is a higher moral duty. If God has given us a life, it's an act of impiety and ingratitude to refuse to see it to the end. It seemed to me that Seneca's earlier advice on bearing suffering was much better than this-- let us rather have the fortitude to bear the life we have been given, than to retreat like a coward into a death chosen rather by ourselves than by the gods.
We have a moral duty to see our lives to the end, and not to run away from suffering. By our suffering we may expiate our sins; we may train ourselves to endure; we may learn compassion for others who suffer; we may even offer our own pain as a sacrifice on others' behalf. By suicide we gain nothing.
I think that that probably is the right response. That said, I want to suggest that it is worth taking a moment-- just a moment-- and entering into Seneca's ideas on their own terms. Part of the point of reading these Old Things is that they are a repository of wisdom that we may need in these times. But the other point is less about the content of the Old Things than about their context. Whether it's Seneca or Aristotle, Louis de Montfort or Eliphas Levi, the authors that I post here all lived in different times, different places, and different cultures from ourselves. The result is that they were able to think thoughts that are unavailable to us on a day to day basis. If there is one thing that we as a culture desperately need, it's the ability to think other thoughts than those to which we have become habituated.
Do we need thoughts of suicide? Maybe not, but the very extremity of those thoughts may be work to jar something loose in our minds and open unexpected doors, when an easier thought could not have done so.
And so I repeat the suggestion: Take a moment and enter into Seneca's way of thinking. The way out lies open, and you can take it at any time. Don't fear what comes so quickly.
